(upbeat electronic music) - I had always been a troublemaker for as long as I can remember. I think by the time I was 13 I was getting into trouble with the police, I was taking drugs, smelling cannabis, I was taking ecstasy, I had been arrested for shoplifting. I've been done for burglary, for arson, criminal damage. There's something about getting into trouble that just really excited me. And the more I tried to sort myself out, the worse that I got. I was selling most drugs in most nightclubs. Those places that I wasn't selling drugs I made sure I had people selling drugs for me in those places. I got so good at selling drugs, I got so good at doing what I was doing that I started to get noticed by the people above me. It wasn't long before I started selling drugs for them. Now we was buying drugs from people like the Albanian mafia and we were selling to the likes of Hell's Angels. We was buying one or two kilos of cocaine a week, and I was looking for fulfilment in drugs, in sex, in power, in my status. The only problem is when you have a status, when you have a reputation, you've got to live up to that, and you've got to do things to make sure that people don't take that from you. The guy that I was selling drugs for, the gang leader, as you might call him, he phoned me up and told me that he'd been attacked by a rival gang. And so, he asked me to go to one of the safe houses and to pick up a firearm. I was nervous, very nervous about what was about to happen but I went to this safe house and I put on a brave front and I picked up a firearm and remember getting into my friend's car that day, leaving the house with the intention to kill. That day, if I had bumped into these guys, if we'd have found the people we was looking for, I'd have pulled the trigger. Thankfully that day I never had to do what I thought I was going to have to do, and we didn't find anybody. And I think, if I'm honest, at that point I realised that I needed help. I desperately needed help. Although I knew that I needed help I couldn't help myself, and so slowly over time as I got into more and more trouble, I ended up in prison. And I remember looking out of the little window in this prison wagon with my hands cuffed looking at the guards and the towers, seeing the gates, and suddenly realising, you know what? You're not a gangster, you're an idiot, you've messed up your life, and now you've got to deal with the consequences, you're in prison. A prisoner who'd been transferred with me from one prison to the other came to me and started to talk to me about God. I couldn't understand what I was hearing. I really couldn't understand it. Here I was in prison with my life in danger, and this guy wanted to talk to me about God. How could God help me? How could God help me in this situation that I'd gotten myself into? And it was a couple of days later that I was walking past the chapel signup sheet. So, when you're in prison what you do is you sign up your name to chapel and on a Sunday a guard will come to you and they'd release you from your cell and they'd take you to the chapel. And I signed up my name to go to chapel. And for some reason at that very moment in time a sense of peace hit me that I'd never experienced anywhere else before. So, I remember going back to my cell and I don't remember exactly what I said but it was something along the lines of God, if you're out there, if you are who these people say you are, then help me. Whatever it costs, whatever I have to do, whatever the cost to me may be, I am yours, I give my life to you. Please, take my life and do with it whatever you want. The gang that I was involved with were caught in a drug trade and they were taken off the streets. The relationships that they were in they started to break down. All the time this gave me more and more time to work on my relationship with God. I was no longer a drug addict. There was no drugs rehabilitation. There was no counselling. There was no replacement therapy. It was just the power of God. His word and prayer. What I found when I came to church was something different. The people were different. They seemed to have this sense of joy about them. They were loving and caring and they just accepted me for who I was. I'm looking forward to the future. I'm not entirely sure where this journey is gonna lead me but I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going. My life has changed massively. All I want to do now is try and help people not to make the same mistakes that I made. I've been back to a prison and I got to share a message of hope with the people that were in there. I'm working with a local youth group trying to encourage those kids not to make the same mistakes that I made.

The Great Commission’s all about inspiring a passion for evangelism in our communities, empowering each one of us, and our churches, to be talking about Jesus – showing God's love in words as well as deeds.
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